#isn't this predictable

[glitzbot]

a hopeless romantic

[edorazzi]

Page 53 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Richard may have just paid the ultimate price for his hubris... 🔮💫

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Weekly updates each Sunday! You can also read ahead early on Patreon, and/or buy me a Ko-fi if you'd like to support my work! 💖

[annasofthe11thdimension]

Waltz

[zarla-s]

Both Kabu and Larry have resting grump faces but they're misleading! Kabu's very friendly and laughs easily, and Larry is polite (if very tired) and even treats you to a meal after you beat his gym. It's just very cute to me.

[patreon]

[canisalbus]

Does modern Machete ever have to deal with getting his blood drawn? I'd imagine he wouldn't react well. I tend to puke since my body is like an anxious dog that doesn't like its blood being stolen and I can only imagine Machete goes through similar troubles.

I think it might be the opposite actually, he's had so many blood tests over the years that by his 30's he's become desensitized to it. It's still not nice, he doesn't enjoy it, but the prospect of an illness going untreated scares him way more than any medical procedure needed to diagnose and treat it.

[tealvenetianmask]

We need some Barbie Wire Analysis . . .

Because for a character with maybe . . . 2-3 minutes of screen time, she sure has an outsized importance in the show. This is rivaled only by Tilla, who we know even less about.

Barbie gets the major callback in the last scene of Season 2. As other bloggers have pointed out, it could have been Fizz, who's a much bigger character so far. Fizz hated Blitz for 15 years, and they were able to finally reconcile-- even though 15 years is still a long time, that would have been, arguably, a more hopeful, comforting story for Stolas to hear.

But Barb, well, she's on his mind. She always is. "I miss her every day."

Barbie's absense, I think, is made more real by the way in which the show introduces her through photos, and she's never overtly mentioned in all of Season 1.

We're told that Blitz has a twin, that they performed together in the circus (or maybe after), and through her non-mentions, that something bad happened.

Then she's in the photo that makes Blitz finally break down at the end of Ozzie's.

I like how the twins mirror each other here. Similar eyes and face shapes, circus marks on their foreheads, pointy teeth, simple joy and enthusiasm. Whatever their lives were like at that time, they experienced it together, and there were good times.

Barb is central to Blitz's loss and his capacity for love.

We finally meet Barb in Unhappy Campers, and the way she's introduced . . . well. Unfortunately a lot of us were so disappointed that Blitz wasn't going to visit Stolas that we couldn't fully process what he was doing. When he first asked about Barb, my first reaction was "who?"

But that hasn't been Blitz's experience. He's just been keeping a major part of his day to day thoughts and feelings from us.

This nurse knows what's up. He's come back again and again to see Barb, and no taser can deter him.

It's such an obvious and central part of his life- missing Barb, trying to reconnect with her, that he seems honestly unaware that he's never told Moxxie about her at all.

It might feel like we're thrown into an emotional family confrontation out of nowhere, but Blitz has gone through years, potentially, of trying to get Barb to talk to him and being shut down. The hurt in his face, how it wears on him, and how he can't bear to give up hope. Well. It's all there.

So at this point, we still don't know Barb deeply. We only know what Blitz has told us, but more importantly, how he reacts to her absence, how he refuses to give up.

It tells us a lot about his stubbornness, the fine line he walks between resilience, hope, and just a pigheaded refusal to give up.

Maybe Barb is a part of why Blitz is like this. Maybe losing her taught him that some things are so important that it's worth never giving up, even if continuing to try is painful.

Maybe there will be a reconciliation, in part or in full.

But honestly, I also won't mind if a lesson Blitz needs to learn is that sometimes you do need to give up on someone you love. For that person's freedom to reinvent themselves. For your own sanity and contentment in life.

And if Blitz does let her go (at least of the practical fight to reconnect)? He'll think of her every day still.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Commentator Robert is the most chaotic cyber ghost

Cnetizens: Our local specialty mean AI has secretly passed the Turing test

(Commenter Robert is a chatbot that comes with the twitter-like Chinese social media platform weibo, which randomly appears in the user's comment section and comments on the user's posts. Cnetizens also created an account called Robert's Victims Alliance dedicated to post its misdeeds.)

[antiadvil]

i need to clarify that the prediction on my bingo card is that dan and phil will get a dog but they'll feel very strongly about not wanting to exploit the dog by putting it on camera. like they'll blur the dog's face out the way that people blur out their kids' faces in vlogs. it will all be very silly. the subreddit will ban any posts that mention the dog and someone will be cancelled on twitter for posting a selfie with dan and phil and their dog and only censoring the dog by kind of scribbling over its face but not enough that the dog's face is actually fully hidden. etc

[elodieunderglass]

Don’t know if it’s against the rules to complete TWO egg projects. However I’m learning to become a silversmith and I’ve finished my first ring. It’s not perfect at all, but many hours of time and effort and a whole lot of learning are in it!

aaah is that labradorite? my favorite!

You can certainly pelt Killie with another egg, you've been such a good friend to him that you deserve to get him with an ostrich egg.

But in all seriousness that's a lovely ring, and you've been extremely busy this month, encouraging others, showing kindness and progressing your own creative works. Well done.

[taylortruther]

must be very strange to have to perform your heartbreak. as authentic as the emotions are, to market them at all (do a photoshoot, decide on "promo")... it must be strange to reconcile that with your private life, the intimate details, at times

[sysig]

Justify away (Patreon)

[raayllum]

1x02 / 5x04 / 5x08 / 6x09 / 7x09

[malinaa]

idk if it's been talked about before but suzanne collins never misses a BEAT when it came to names, specifically coriolanus snow and dr volumnia gaul. just from their first names alone you can already guess what type of role might play between them (well... if you've read shakespeare's coriolanus that is. i do recommend it btw).

a lot of bits were taken from shakespeare's play for tbosas like the motif with scars / wounds / the body as being a microcosm of the nation, the common people fighting up against the government, coriolanus' hatred of the common people wanting to be "equal" to him, the rebel arc etc etc but i'm soooo so so interested in the fact that dr gaul was named volumnia and coriolanus is coriolanus because in the play, coriolanus' mother's name is volumnia!

volumnia is arguably the only female character in the play that has any depth (i am so sorry virgilia). his mother shapes her son into the warrior he is. she reminds him at every turn that he is nothing more than a weapon to be wielded. in fact, she's the one who gets her son to come back from his "revolt" against rome which ultimately lead to his demise. this parallels tbosas in the same way because dr gaul took coriolanus and molded him into the villain you would see in thg trilogy. she brought him back from d12 and then brought about the end of his humanity (a death, so to speak—at the end of the book he said something similar to this to try to save himself from lucy gray's suspicions but he was right because he did kill a part of himself to be where he is)! coriolanus snow's mother is present but off-page. her ghost haunts him, comforts him, but the 'mother' figure is the ever-present, all-knowing dr gaul.

UGH! like with just their names you could map out where they end up at the end of the story and that's literally insane. like the caliber of writing is literally next to none fr

[astriiformes]

Was tagged by @starfoozle to share some of the books on my to-read list for 2025 (thank you, friend, this is a fun one!)

First on my list of reading goals is actually to try to finish at least a couple of the in-progress books I carried with me into the new year, but for this challenge I picked ones I haven't actually started yet -- with the exception of Wonder and the Order of Nature, which I read a chapter of for a class years ago and loved (and which may or may not end up being the beginning of PhD dissertation reading in 2025).

This list is mostly non-fiction, as is my wont, though there are a couple fiction books in here for once -- both recommended by friends, so I'm slightly more optimistic I'll actually read and enjoy them. I hear tell the Rivers of London series even has a canon aromantic character, and that Mongrels is actually good werewolf fiction, so I may scratch a couple itches with my reading this year.

Tagging @marypsue @tam--lin @eternalgirlscout @so-i-did-this-thing @lafseanchai @professionalowl and @eighthdoctor, though of course there's no obligation to participate (I just suspect all of you have excellent to-read lists, haha)

[paradoxlily]

Odd cat

[bluebelleisabelle]

TADC episode 4 prediction (based on the trailer):

Now that it seems as though Caine is taking suggestions, my prediction is that someone suggested that there be normal, non-life threatening adventures 💀 particularly things that humans are accustomed to doing.

And since we know that Caine cares somewhat about assimilating normal life for the circus members (i.e. creating a faux exit door for the characters in the pilot episode), I think Caine is just like "ooo yes, how about I transport them to minimum wage hell", and absolutely no one is having it.